LED Lighting Dimming Method

source:tcl-lighting

Time:06/12/2018

With pursuing smart life and smart city, lighting product intelligentization is becoming inevitable trend for lighting industry. But before achieving smart life completely, it still has a long way to go for TCL LED lighting.

In common use, the dimming function of lighting products turns to be the basic function before intelligentization. There are five dimming method in current market as below.

Leading edge phase dimming dominates the most of market by accurate adjustment, high efficiency, small configuration and remote controlling characteristics. Since Leading edge phase dimming generally use silicon controlled rectifier as switch element, it is also called triac dimmer.

Trailing Edge phase dimming

Trailing Edge phase dimmer applies field effect transistor (FET) or insulated gate bipolar transistor(IGBT). Generally it uses MOSFET as switch element, which is also known as MOSFET dimmer.

1-10V dimming

For 1-10V dimming, driver design includes control chip, which can change driver output current by 1-10V dimmer voltage change. For example, when we adjust the 1-10V dimmer to 1V, the output current will change to 10%. If we adjust it to 10V, the output current will reach 100%, the brightness also reach 100%.

DALI Dimming

DALI is abbreviation of digital addressable lighting interface. Under DALI system, it can command lighting on/off, dimming, scene setting and status monitoring. The biggest advantage is DALI can control 64units(individual address), 16 groups and 16 scenes. With this strength, it can achieve different scene controlling and management. However, complicated signal wiring and expensive price are still pain points.

In practical application, DMX512 requires complicated wirings because of controller, and its receiver needs to set up the address to make sure it can receive dimming command explicitly. Connecting more controllers to control complicated lightings leads to its application limit. Therefore, DMX is more suitable for lightings located in the same place, such as stage lighting.

Based on above five dimming method characteristics, customer can choose suitable dimming way to meet their different needs.